14 comments:

It is very helpful to be presented with this photo array. Seeing a group of picture provokes the assembling and ordering of thoughts in a way that looking at a single photo doesn't and I have to confess that Qadaffi usually renders me speechless. It's hard to believe that a guy like this is walking around. This may sound utterly naive, but it was deeply disturbing to read, as I did a couple of years ago, that Prince Andrew pals around with Qaddafi's son and they still return to England and live there. But that's another story. King of Kings. Ok, then.

Thanks for this also. I meant to say (re Andrew) "they still let him return to England to live there", but my scrambled thoughts are unimportant (and getting increasingly scrambled by the moment). I could go on and on about my former senator Mrs. Clinton, but that would mean getting started, which I won't.

Quite right, I don't think they should let Prince Andrew live in Britain, the guy's just an embarrassment.

Qadaffi is a great dresser and thanks to these pictures you can see he always has been, sort of swimming against the tide of fashion. Too bad he didn't pass this gene along to the son Saif, who is a safe dresser of the worst sort.

I'm no fan of Qadaffi, I look on his works and despair, but I'm getting quite irritated by the excuse that he's got to go because he's killing his own people, like he's practically a cannibal. In every other case this action is called a civil war: Abraham Lincoln did it, many kings of France and of England did it (Henry VII, Henry VIII, Charles I to name the first three off the top of my head).

This business about shifting focus of news stories is something seldom remarked.

We're "concerned" about something--a leader, an event, a principle--which is foregrounded in the media for a specific period of time, after which it is supplanted with a new subject. Our memory of the unfolding and sequence of these areas of focus fades very quickly, as does the record of them.

We're "concerned" about Khadafi for a week or so, but we lose interest quickly. If he isn't deposed within a week, we move to Gen Petraeus's latest report from the field in Afghanistan, then to a disaster in Japan, then to Illinois where government workers are deprived of union bargaining.

Meanwhile, these stories continue to evolve, even as we move on to new concerns. The idea that we must "keep track" of all these things is a spur to constant anxiety, but this too passes. We know we're supposed to be concerned about all these things, and we know just as well that we can't "keep up" with them all, and there isn't enough compassion and time and influence we have to spend in actively responding. We've become passive--and our vicarious regard for all this stuff becomes a kind of expedient apathy.

We're all so concerned. But what does it mean? Where does it lead? The man who tends his sheep in the mountains of Macedonia is in the same boat we are, but none of this distraction disturbs his day. We're all "connected" but in what sense?

Sometimes it all seems like elaborate hand-wringing. I'm not suggesting we ignore these things, just that their progress, and the tenor of our response to them, be kept in mind. We're preoccupied with something only long enough for our patience to thin, at which point we become seduced by the next thing. As news junkies, we consume and consume, and try to form some responsible, useful picture of the world. But someone else is behind the green curtain. We're living through some news director's scenario of reality, who decides what the pace and duration of each bit will be.

Astute style analysis, though you've unaccountably left out elevator heels as a power balancer.

But someone says "I'm sure she does wear high heels, but up against the son of Gaddafi, she hasn't got a chance."

(Just the sort of thing somebody who's not American might be expected to say, of course.)

By the by, it's perhaps not generally known that the young tall fellow's suit lapels are protected by zirconium cladding, at great expense to the world's zircon supply. Hopefully our sapient Secretary of State will have been briefed in advance on this, and administered a sturdy dose of potassium iodide just to be prepared should he have caught fire due to an errant flash-bulb explosion (not to be confused with a runway-targeted assassination attempt, of course).

About singling out this particular bloody civil war and brutal corrupt dictatorship, rather than any of the many other bloody civil wars and brutal dictatorships in present-day Africa, in which to intervene, it does seem rather inconsistent; though on the other hand it does seem entirely consistent with directing "foreign policy" specifically toward those areas rich in that substance the obtaining of which will allow the mass of xenophobic Americans to maintain the practise of their great secular religion, the Church of Lifestyle.

... and thinking a bit further about Curtis F.'s legitimate annoyance with feeling as though "living through some news director's scenario of reality, who decides what the pace and duration of each bit will be": I think we all share that annoyance, and don't like having our attention and concentration capacities disrespected to the degree it can be assumed we are able to attend only for a few seconds to any given reality-byte, before the stream moves on.

On the other hand, I think it's also true that the turnings of recent events in Japan and Libya have been characterized by, if anything, a lack of "direction" on the part of anybody.

What grabs the mind, and properly, are the breakthrough moments in which we come to realize that the orders of things, as we take them for granted, are not really orders at all but merely tenuous temporary arrangements of convenience (or inconvenience).

And then when something happens that undermines this illusion of control, we are brought up short -- as we should be.

You're quite right about the control being illusory, but isn't it inborn for us to want control of our environment, and to feel we've got it? Nobody yearns for chaos. The idea of being the first person to take a trip to Mars absolutely fills me with dread, partly for this reason and partly because of the claustrophobia and boredom. (Knowing it's not going to happen doesn't help.)